Contaminated histories: Canadian Postcolonialism in Guy Maddin's Tales from the Gimli Hospital.

Church, David

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has built an international reputation upon eccentric, autobiographically tinged melodramas constructed from the visual motifs of silent-era cinema. During his career, he has also periodically mythologized his hometown of Winnipeg, whether depicting it as the "world capital of sorrow" in The Saddest Music in the World [2003], or as the site of his own fraught family history in the poetic auto-ethnography of My Winnipeg [2007]. Reviewing a harvest of recent critical scholarship on Maddin, George Melnyk argues that "No other Canadian filmmaker today is more postmodern and postcolonial than Maddin. In creating a retro cinema like no other he has actually caught the essence of contemporary Canadian identity as it struggles to articulate a self suited to a world where the old national-realist paradigm no longer holds." (1) In this sense, Melnyk echoes various critics who have previously remarked upon the apparent "Canadianness" of Maddin's films, (2) but I will focus instead on how he imaginatively refigures his Icelandic-Canadian ancestry in his first filmic vision of the Winnipeg area, Tales from the Gimli Hospital [1988]. This low-budget dark comedy, independently produced over two years, established Maddin as a distinct new voice in Canadian cinema, and garnered a cult reputation abroad (particularly after an eighteen-month New York run as a midnight movie). It has become something of a truism to describe Maddin as a postmodern director, but to position him as a postcolonial director is a task that deserves further elaboration. Because it not only displays the coalescence of a filmmaking aesthetic that would define Maddin's oeuvre, but also deliberately engages with the historical intersection of the diverse cultural strands that have influenced modern-day Manitoba, Gimli Hospital is arguably the most significant film through which to explore the postcolonial in his work. In humorously depicting the plight of Second World settlers--a postcolonial position between colonizer and colonized--through an anachronistically "primitive" aesthetic, his debut feature complicates not only the historical sublimation of immigrant ethnicity into national identity, but also blurs potentially colonialist distinctions between classical cinema and its own ancestors. By "contaminating" the supposed authenticity of ethnic and national myths, he finds a position to speak from the margins of a modern nation under the continuing threat of American cultural imperialism.

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In contrast to Canada's naturalized settlers of predominately British origin, the Canadian prairies of the mid-to-late nineteenth century were populated by a high percentage of immigrants from other European nations, and the latter soon became marked as "ethnic" within the national imaginary, according to Gerald Friesen. (3) Indeed, according to one anonymous account, Winnipeggers did not initially recognize the group of Icelanders who arrived in 1875, expecting them to look "short, about four feet, rather stout and thick set, with long black hair and much like the Eskimos." (4) The March 1875 eruption of Mount Askja had forced a large migration of about two thousand Icelanders to Canada, where they moved west and, claiming blocks of land reserved by the federal government for minority communities, established the fishing settlement of Gimli on the shores of Lake Winnipeg. (5) Gimli became the self-governing Republic of New Iceland in 1876, until its 1887 incorporation into the adjacent province of Manitoba. As W. Kristjanson notes, the creation of a separate colony for Icelandic settlers was prompted by a strong desire to preserve their cultural heritage. Even after becoming de facto "Englishmen" through the colony's place on Canadian federal territory, Lord Dufferin, Governor-General of Canada, promised the Icelanders the right to maintain their customs. (6) Yet, Friesen notes that, as the area became less ethnically homogeneous with the influx of non-Icelandic immigrants, a tension existed within the Icelandic community between "public conformity to English-Canadian cultural norms and private, family-centered efforts to retain their language and culture and to instill in their children an awareness of and pride in their national heritage." (7)

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The latter tendency is represented by Gimli Saga, a 1975 local history compiled by a civic townswomen's group, which places the Icelandic-Canadian settler experience within the longstanding tradition of Icelandic sagas--and a book which directly inspired Maddin's film. (8) For him, "there was a lot of original material in these great myths of settlers' early days that seemed very dark and bleak to the point of being funny--a really modern sensibility in this century-old story." Yet, by Maddin's own admission, the film's melodramatic content was also inspired by his homoerotic rivalry with a man with whom he had shared a female lover, and by a professional rivalry between himself and already established Winnipeg filmmaker John Paizs. (9)

Framed as a settler tale told by an Icelandic grandmother (Margaret Anne MacLeod) to the children of a woman dying in modern-day Gimli Hospital, the film recounts how immigrant fisherman Einar the Lonely (Kyle McCulloch) contracts an unnamed disease while tending his nets, and is quarantined in hospital. In reality, the newly founded Gimli had suffered a smallpox epidemic in the winter of 1876-77, causing Manitoba to send three doctors to the quickly constructed Gimli hospital and impose a ten-month armed quarantine upon the colony. Unlike Maddin's exaggerated portrayal of multiple deaths and gruesome medical practices, patients at the real Gimli hospital fared far better than the general population during the epidemic, largely due to receiving better diet and care than they could in their own homes. Of the sixty-four smallpox cases treated in the hospital, only one proved fatal, whereas about one hundred people died within the total colony of 1400-1500 settlers. However, the disease decimated nearby First Nations villages--including the family of John Ramsay, a local First Nations member with close ties to the Icelanders, who is also portrayed in Maddin's film. (10) Set against this dire historical backdrop, Einar befriends fellow patient Gunnar (Michael Gottli), with whom he unsuccessfully vies for the nurses' attention. Growing more delirious while the nurses neglect his care, Einar confesses that he had defiled the corpse of Gunnar's young wife, Snjofridur (Angela Heck), mistaking her burial site for that of a Cree princess. Gunnar recognizes the ornamental shears that Einar had stolen from the grave, and promptly goes blind from the shock. Wandering outside the hospital, Einar and Gunnar feverishly wrestle, tearing at each other's buttocks until they collapse together. Their jealousy apparently sated, the two men, now recovered from their illnesses, greet each other the next spring as if nothing had occurred.

Despite his goal of annoying his family with this comically excessive re-visioning of his ancestral history, Maddin's offhanded admission that Icelanders "don't need mocking any more than Third World people need starving," since Icelanders are "a monument to mockery already," (11) implies a certain comparison between Second World immigrants and decolonized, "developing" nations. While this comparison problematically elides the cultural, economic, and geographical differences faced by various communities within the history of colonialism, it nevertheless raises the question of where European settlers fit within Canada's postcolonial legacy.

The Settler Subject in Canadian Postcolonialism

As a former colony of both France and Britain, Canadian critics have sometimes raised Canada's alleged "Third World" status as a trope for discussing its alienation from its colonial forefathers and its subjection to continued cultural imperialism from the United States. W. J. Keith, for example, observes that "Canada has chafed under a sense of Third World status in cultural affairs, especially vis-a-vis our southern neighbor," being part of neither the U.S. nor Europe. (12) While critics like Linda Hutcheon have challenged this metaphor for "trivializing ... the Third World experience and exaggerat[ing] ... the (white) Canadian" one, (13) other critics posit "Second World" settlers as an important group that has been previously neglected by Canadian postcolonial theory. This has occurred because, as Stephen Slemon observes, that immigrant demographic "is not sufficiently pure in its anti-colonialism, because it does not offer up an experiential grounding in a common 'Third-World' aesthetics, [and] because its modalities of post-coloniality are too ambivalent." (14) According to Donna Bennett, English Canada has historically been both "subjected to an imperial power" and "an agent of that power in the control it has exercised over populations within Canada's boundaries." Prairie Westerners lacking that British ancestry, such as Maddin's Icelandic predecessors, "brought a new kind of postcolonialism into English-language Canada because they eventually asserted a kind of separatist claim on cultural identity different from that of the Quebecois or even the Natives." For Bennett, then, becoming an immigrant is to become colonized on some level, because "one's old culture, and thus one's identity, is always marginalized or under threat." (15) Yet, the blurred binary between colonizer and colonized is internalized through the Second World settler's ambivalence between complicity with, and resistance to, colonialism. (l6) Likewise, Alan Lawson describes the settler subject as "the place where the operations of colonial power as negotiation are most intensely visible." This positionality is made possible because settlers mimic imperial power to justify the acquisition of a frontier space to which they have no originary claim, but do so through also mimicking the cultural authority of the Indigene. The cultural nationalism maintained as resistance against the imperium can thus enable a simultaneous cooptation by the imperium, in which the national "replaces the indigenous and in doing so conceals its participation in colonialism by nominating a new colonized subject--the colonizer or invader-settler." (17)

As these tensions play out in Gimli Hospital, the film's very insularity prevents us from glimpsing the world beyond the Icelandic settlement, as if restricting its scope to the ethnic community itself; most of the action occurs within the hospital, on the beaches of Lake Winnipeg, or in the wooded areas nearby. While Maddin may have constructed what Will Straw calls a "bogus ethnography," (18) becoming difficult to separate his invented Icelandic-Canadian customs and myths from real ones, he nevertheless includes numerous signifiers of Icelandic ethnicity--such as traditional Icelandic clothing, Icelandic flags, Icelandic audio recordings, images of traditional food and drink, and glima wrestling. The recounting of Icelandic sagas plays a prominent role in the narrative's economy of desire: Snjofridur reads the sagas to Gunnar shortly before their marriage, Gunnar captures the nurses' attention with the sagas while in hospital, and Einar is unable to win their affection because he cannot successfully tell his own tales. For the settlers, then, maintaining the nationalist boundaries of their shared cultural history is tied to the propagation of community. Indeed, Icelanders are the film's primary characters, and only occasionally do we see an indigenous person, a representative of the Canadian government, or some other outsider to Gimli. For example, John Ramsay (Don Hewak), a local Metis man, stands up for Gunnar at his wedding, and buries Snjofridur when she soon dies from the disease. Although Maddin accurately acknowledges in his DVD commentary that the real Icelanders were remarkably proficient in spreading smallpox to the indigenous locals, (19) the film focuses primarily on the devastation suffered by the white settlers. Einar mistakes the dead Snjofridur for an indigenous woman because Ramsay had buried her on an elevated, birch-bark funeral bed, traditional to local First Nations peoples, instead of a "Christian grave" in the ground. The conflict that this "violation" (first cultural, then sexual) eventually engenders between Einar and Gunnar suggests that Ramsay's proximity to the Icelanders potentially threatens their authority by reasserting the place of indigeneity through his intervention as a person of mixed Native/European heritage. After all, as Lawson notes, the settler "exercises authority over the Indigene and the land while translating his (but rarely her) desire for the Indigene and the land into a desire for Native authenticity," leading to "the inadmissible desire for miscegenation." (20)

The epidemic has weakened the Icelanders' authority to maintain full control over their customs (e.g., the afflicted Gunnar lacks the strength to dig Snjofridur's Christian grave), enabling Einar's mistaken "miscegenation" with the dead settler woman. Ironically, ethnic signifiers apparently make him as capable of mistaking fellow Icelanders for Canada's indigenous population as English-Canadian Winnipeggers were upon the real Icelanders' arrival. The resulting fight between Einar and Gunnar occurs during Lord Dufferin's nearby speech to the settlers, as though the arrival of Canada's highest-ranking imperial representative triggers violence between those Icelanders who can enunciate their cultural history and those who cannot. Meanwhile, a highland pipe band accompanies their bloody bout of glima wrestling, which Maddin deems a reference to the "weird amalgam" of cultures that today take part in Gimli's annual Islendingadagurinn (or "Icelandic Days") celebration.21 Even as Lord Dufferin validates the settlers' right to preserve their national culture through their imperial claim upon the land, his presence signals a threatened dissolution of ethnic identity for the future Gimli as it becomes enveloped by the supposed "cultural mosaic" of the larger nation.

Stylistic Archaism and the "Primitive" Cinematic Past

"It all happened in a Gimli we no longer know," says Amma, the grandmother in the film's framing story. She wears the garb of a fjallkona, an elected female elder of the Icelandic community, indicating her strong ties to Gimli's ethnic traditions. (22) Yet, Maddin quips that the modern "Icelandic gene pool has been watered down to next to nothing. When a person with a non-Icelandic surname like me gets to be one of this ethnic group's biggest spokespersons, you know your ethnicity's in trouble." He describes today's Gimli as "a town of strip malls slowly evolving into a slightly slicker, touristy thing ... [that] would be far better if it had a lot more of its past in its present." (23) In this respect, Maddin may be poking fun at those later-generation Canadians who fiercely embrace their immigrant ethnicity instead of patriotically embracing Canada as a whole, (24) but he also retains some nostalgia for his ancestors' cultural past. Outside modern-day Gimli Hospital during the film's prologue, we hear snarls of traffic and rock music, but inside the dying mother's room, a scratched record endlessly loops the same few seconds of Paul Whiteman's 1929 rendition of "I'm a Dreamer (Aren't We All)" while a 7-Eleven Super Big Gulp sits in bed beside her. The odd juxtaposition of Amma's traditional garb, the degraded audio of the late-1920s tune, and the Super Big Gulp symbolizing imported American consumerism sets the tone for the anachronistic filmmaking style that continues throughout the film. As Amma begins the story of Einar the Lonely, Maddin cuts between zooms toward the stuttering record player and the children's faces, as if the youthful present is straining to slide back into the past at any moment--seemingly confirmed as the song resumes playing normally once we flash back to the Gimli of yore.

Even when ostensibly set in the 1870s, the film's formal qualities are more closely aligned with cinema's silent and early sound eras; the Gimli maidens, for example, wear flapper attire and expressionistic makeup. Reviewing his own film (in the third person), Maddin describes it as shot "in the vernacular spoken by film in the year of its own glorious second childhood--namely 1929. [Maddin] mixes black-and-white with toned sequences, mime with talking, locked-down expositional tableaux with bumpily fluid musical numbers." As a simulated "part-talkie," the film is intended to be "not juvenile but willfully childish" in its "primitive" aesthetic. (25) Indeed, discussing the connection between Maddin's stylistic archaism and his campily melodramatic plots, William Beard argues that, "On the one hand, the naivete of and extremity of the forms enables the tapping of equally naive and extreme emotions, rooted in childhood and requiring a quasi-childlike intensity and directness of expression. On the other hand, the derisory impossibility of melodrama reflects the grotesque appearance of these feelings and events to an adult, postmodern view." (26) If Maddin's deliberately "primitive" aesthetic allows him to better express his own emotional concerns--albeit safely cloaked under the cover of pastiche--then I would argue that perhaps his socio-cultural concerns can be aided through this strategy as well, particularly in an age when postmodern theory has (for better or worse) challenged the individual subject's coherence as a site for forming an "authentic" sense of ethnic identity.

Maddin's archaism recalls Diana Brydon's argument that postmodern devices can serve postcolonial ends when affirming the "cultural contamination" created in the process of settlers becoming indigenous. In this way, the conflicted relationship between settlers and colonialism complicates their myths of cultural purity and authenticity. Although Brydon specifically focuses on texts by "white Canadian writers embracing Native spirituality," her argument's larger implications posit "contaminated" texts as exhibiting the openness of all cultures to outside influences, pushing toward a "new globalism [that] simultaneously asserts local independence and global interdependencies." (27) By resisting the same imperial power that would consign them to the larger nation, the actual Icelandic settlers' performance of subjectivity would seemingly locate them in the space of cultural difference that Homi K. Bhabha sees emerging in-between "a prefigurative self-generating nation 'in-itself' and extrinsic other nations." (28)

In Gimli Hospital, however, Maddin's stylistic archaism does not support a cultural traditionalism springing from the acquisition of territory. He instead turns traditional-cum-national cinematic modes of lensing history against the nation's "teleology of progress" (29) by mocking the self-serious ethnic histories that give rise to comforting national-mythic narratives about modern Canada as a "cultural mosaic." In other words, using the cinematic vocabulary of old Hollywood in his 1988 film results in "contamination" between different historical periods and cultural contexts, undercutting the ethnic "authenticity" of his Icelandic immigrant tale through formal anachronism that violates accepted norms of cultural and technological "progress." At the same time, the very pastness of the archaic cinema tropes that he deploys challenges the historical authority of classical Hollywood cinema's culturally colonizing role by illustrating the constructedness and impermanence of that filmmaking style. In this way, the Winnipeg-based Maddin asserts his local independence from Hollywood, while acknowledging Canada's interdependence with U.S. culture. Indeed, he admits to initially "making the movie for a handful of friends" but also "thinking far beyond the confines of Winnipeg and Manitoba and Canada." Echoing Brydon's concept of a "new globalism," he was determined that, like a piece of pop music, a "primitive" film with "the right tone or spirit ... would travel to many countries." (30)

If the United States has arguably supplanted England as the strongest imperial force acting upon modern Canada and its cultural forms, then it is no surprise that Maddin's nostalgia, positioned between the lingering traditions of his immigrant ancestry and Hollywood's ongoing dominance in cinematically imagining history, is contaminated by both past and present. This is particularly illustrated by the film's inclusion of a black-faced minstrel occupying the bed beside Einar. As Maddin explains, despite his love for 1920s culture, "I felt it unfair to celebrate the vocabulary of this era without acknowledging other, more shameful movie conventions, the expletives of the language then in common parlance--for one, the blackface." (31) Also played by Kyle McCulloch--as if a racially inflected mirror of white settler Einar--the minstrel is introduced during a scene in which the hospital nurses place a proscenium-framed puppet show at the foot of Gunnar's bed while the doctor gruesomely operates on his leg with a sickle. Gunnar is made to watch this diversion through opera glasses while the minstrel cavorts nearby, implying that certain once-popular entertainments are politically (and even physically) painful to view today; Maddin's cameo as the pain-inflicting doctor only reinforces the scene's reflexivity. Such "contaminated," anti-realist images, constructed to resemble degraded remnants of cinema history, question the medium's past and present attempts to render cultural authenticity with any degree of accuracy. Not only are classical Hollywood's egregious ethnic representations (such as black-face) at issue, but also a contemporary Canadian cinema that continues to lens its national and regional visions of itself using imported Hollywood standards of verisimilitude.

Patricia Clare Ingham argues that the temporal distance between certain historical periods, such as the pre-modern and modern eras, leads some historians to replicate colonialist notions of progress by essentializing the past as Other to the present, thus obscuring important points of comparison and contrast between the power structures operating in each. (32) In film history, this often occurs when early (pre-1915) cinema is described as "primitive," which Judith Mayne notes is a term often used by scholars without careful attention to the cultural and racial connotations it carried before the birth of cinema. As Mayne observes, historians like Tom Gunning and Kristin Thompson, for example, have respectively described early cinema as a "period of lack in relation to later evolution'" or "a system apart, whose simplicity can be of a value equal to more formal aesthetic traditions." Cinema's origins thus serve as "primal scenes" for film theorists who, by focusing on early cinema through "a fascination with otherness, with the exotic, with all that is seemingly alien to Western culture and subjectivity," posit "not only early films but early viewers as captured within a naive, childlike state of reception." (33) Although historians like Janet Staiger have convincingly challenged the supposed naivete of early films and their spectators, (34) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster notes that film theorists compulsively return to the "fetish cabinet" of early cinema in search of "the seemingly lost continents of subjectivity and agency." (35) Still, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam observe, cinema initially emerged as a colonialist technology supporting notions of historical and cultural progress by making "other" worlds accessible to Western audiences. Early cinema inherited "the structures laid down by the communication infrastructure of empire," and spectator-ship of this popular mass entertainment "mobilized a rewarding sense of national and imperial belonging" that was "flattering to the imperial subject as superior and invulnerable observer." (36) Deployed within scopic regimes of imperial power, yet today marked by its supposed primitivity, early cinema itself can thus be figured as both colonizing and colonized. Later cinematic developments have seemingly eclipsed the Western progress that it originally represented, relegating it to cultural obscurity, despite the continuing power of the cinematic forms to which it gave rise.

Maddin's film mimics the colonial power of early cinema to frame ethnically marked people like the Icelanders as seemingly strange and exotic, but by adopting the form of a part-talkie--an uneasy hybrid between the silent and sound eras--he asserts an alienating measure of cultural difference from the imperialism represented by (post)modern Hollywood cinema. In other words, the formal "primitivism" of the early-classical Hollywood style that he simulates effectively contaminates the distinctions between cinema's 1870s prehistory and its 1980s post-classical contemporary era, without simply conflating those periods. Noting Western audiences' "frisson of colonial condescension" toward Bollywood musicals, for example, Maddin opines that "Western white folk are ashamed and disparaging of melodrama" because it evokes "more innocent times--the days when our corny ancestors believed in such unrealistic stories, told with such a charming technical naivete. [...] Raised on Hollywood films, you crave melodrama without knowing it [...] and you unwittingly watch it at your multiplexes already. Only you can't recognize it until it's imported." (37) His own anachronistic use of melodrama, then, contributes to the apparent "primitivity" of his work, which broad Canadian audiences would be unable to easily accept because their tastes have already been shaped by a contemporary American film culture that, to support imperialist notions of cultural progress, typically disavows its nineteenth-century melodramatic roots. Indeed, although they had previously accepted one of his earlier short films, the Toronto Film Festival rejected Gimli Hospital because the selection committee did not realize that the film was intentionally "primitive." (38)

Donna Bennett notes that, during the 1920s, Canada encouraged its non-British immigrants "to contribute something of their heritage as a way of creating the new national culture" that could resist an influx of cheap American cultural products. This was intended as "a transitory phase, because newcomers would not only modify the culture of Canada but would themselves be modified and Canadianized--both by the settlement experience itself and by their exposure to the culture already in place in the country." The resulting works--including the foundational texts of "Prairie realism," which sprang from areas like Manitoba--were received less in terms of ethnic or immigrant identity than as speaking to a wider national identity. (39) Maddin's quasi-1920s aesthetic, then, harkens back to a period when Icelandic-Canadian identity faced cooptation by the nation, but his mimicry of American cultural products is intended to highlight Canadian national culture's failure to maintain its own boundaries. In a sense, he deploys the imperiurn's (past) representational modes in order to partially reclaim the settlers' impure relationship with colonialism, confronting the paradoxical history of Canada's own national-colonial project in the process. Hollywood has rendered Canadian cinema in general as contaminated as his own ethnic heritage is, but for Maddin, this does not mean disempowerment; after all, as Brydon observes, "contamination" by colonialism does not necessarily imply complicity. (40)

Conclusion

Today, Canadian filmmaking "is conditioned not only by the realities of Hollywood, but also by the often paradoxical interventions of provincial and federal governments who wish to foster both an independent Canadian cinema and a commercially successful one," according to Brenda Austin-Smith. While the tradition of Prairie realism persists in some Manitoban film, Maddin's work rejects realism and "prairie-ness" by "insisting instead on its relation not to nationality, but to a genealogy of filmic images." Austin-Smith declares this a byproduct of Manitoba's marginality to the Canadian commercial mainstream that imitates Hollywood; rather than trying to compete with Hollywood, then, Maddin remains outside the fray by making films with the limited resources at his disposa1. (41) As Canadian cinema is ever more dominated by U.S. culture, speaking from the margins operates not to reassert a unified national or ethnic identity, but to signal the impossibility of a Canadian identity uncontaminated by colonial power. If Bhabha argues that a supposedly "true' national past ... is often represented in the reified forms of realism and stereotype," then I would argue that Maddin's rejection of realism and exaggeration of Icelandic stereotypes to parodic excess is less about refiguring the past through a sense of ancestral ethnic solidarity than it is a commentary on the unstable "present of the people's history" that evades enunciation in simplistic national terms. (42)

Indeed, in the modern-day epilogue of Gimli Hospital, a film literally about the inevitable threat of contamination, the mother dies. Her young daughter asks Amma if she will be their new mother, but she declines, saying she will visit if their father (with whom she quarreled at the film's start) lets her, and begins telling a new story. Although the bastion of Icelandic tradition remains in tension with the imperial father, she defers to his authority--yet, the nostalgia in her settler narratives is a failed anesthetic for her listeners, unable to conceal the troubled boundaries between colonizer and colonized. The ethnic history she narrates is already contaminated by early Hollywood tropes, as if colored by memories of moviegoing from her own youth. It thus remains up to members of the younger generation, like Maddin himself, to decide whether to entertain select cultural valences, inevitably negotiating past and present histories of immigrant and national identity. His film illustrates that if the settler subject is "contaminated" by colonialism, then the settler's descendents retain the potential to contaminate colonialism's national myths in return--ultimately offering important fuel for postcolonial challenges to narratives of cultural authenticity and historical periodization. David Church is a doctoral candidate in Communication and Culture at Indiana University, and the editor of Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin (2009).

Notes

(1.) George Melnyk, "Packing, Unpacking, and Repacking the Cinema of Guy Maddin," Great Plains Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2011): 153.

(2.) Notable discussions of this dimension in Maddin's work include Geoff Pevere, "Guy Maddin: True to Form," Take One, Fall 1992, 9; Will Straw, "Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin's Careful," in Canada's Best Features: Critical Essays on 15 Canadian Films, ed. Gene Walz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 311-14; William Beard, "Maddin and Melodrama," Canadian Journal of Film Studies 14, no. 2 (2005): 13-15; David L. Pike, "Thoroughly Modern Maddin," CineAction, no. 65 (2004): 15; Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson, "'I'm Not an American, I'm a Nymphomaniac': Perverting the Nation in Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World," in Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin, ed. David Church (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009), 224-38; and john Semlcy, "From Big Snow to Big Sadness: The Repatriation of Canadian Cultural Identity in the Films of Guy Maddin," CineAction, no. 73/74 (2008): 32-37.

(3.) Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 244.

(4.) W. Kristjanson, The Icelandic People in Manitoba: A Manitoba Saga (Winnipeg: Wallingford, 1965), 30-31.

(5.) W. L. Morton, Manitoba: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 159.

(6.) Kristjanson, The Icelandic People in Manitoba, 58, 75.

(7.) Friesen, The Canadian Prairies, 262.

(8.) Gimli Saga: The History of Gimli, Manitoba (Gimli, MB: Gimli Women's Institute, 1975).

(9.) Guy Maddin, "Conversations with Guy Maddin," interview by William Beard, in Playing with Memories, 248-49; and Guy Maddin, "Tales from the Gimli Hospital: The Original Script," Cinema Scope, no. 20 (2004): 41.

(10.) Kristjanson, The Icelandic People in Manitoba, 49-51.

(11.) Quoted in Caelum Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium: The Films of Guy Maddin (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2000), 43.

(12.) W. J. Keith, "Third World America: Some Preliminary Considerations," in Studies on Canadian Literature: Introductory and Critical Essays, ed. Arnold E. Davidson (New York: MLA, 1990), 5.

(13.) Linda Hutcheon, "Circling the Downspout of Empire," in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, eds. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 171.

(14.) Stephen Slemon, "Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World," World Literature Written in English 30, no. 2 (1990): 35.

(15.) Donna Bennett, "English Canada's Postcolonial Complexities," in Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004), 116-17, 122.

(16.) Slemon, "Unsettling the Empire," 38-39.

(17.) Alan Lawson, "Postcolonial Theory and the 'Settler' Subject," in Unhomely States, 155-56, 159-60.

(18.) Straw, "Reinhabiting Lost Languages," 306.

(19.) Guy Maddin, DVD commentary track, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (Kino Video, 2000). Kristjanson confirms the historical accuracy of this devastating effect upon the indigenous population (The Icelandic People in Manitoba, 49-51).

(20.) Lawson, "Postcolonial Theory and the 'Settler' Subject," 156-57.

(21.) Maddin, "Conversations with Guy Maddin," 249.

(22.) In a tradition inaugurated in 1924, the fjallkona presides over Islendingadagurinn, which dates back to approximately 1890, according to Jonas Par, Islendingadagurinn 1890-1989: An Illustrated History (Gimli, MB: Icelandic Festival of Manitoba, 1989), 2, 39.

(23.) Maddin, Gimli Hospital DVD commentary track.

(24.) For Maddin's comments on this tendency in the context of The Saddest Music in the World, a later film that also humorously engages issues of ethnic identity in Canada, see Guy Maddin, "The Pleasures of Melancholy: An Interview with Guy Maddin," interview by Marie Losier and Richard Porton, Cineaste 29, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 21.

(25.) Guy Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings (Toronto: Coach House, 2003), 91-92.

(26.) Beard, "Maddin and Melodrama," 11.

(27.) Diana Brydon, "The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy," in Past the Last Post, 195-96. Maddin's frequent collaborator, University of Manitoba film professor George Toles, suggested the name "Gunnar" after Icelandic-Canadian novelist Kristjana Gunnars (Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 47), whose work Brydon discusses as exemplifying the immigrant voice that disputes notions of cultural authenticity ("The White Inuit Speaks," 197-202).

(28.) Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 148.

(29.) Ibid., 149, 151.

(30.) Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 46.

(31.) Guy Maddin, "Tales of Guy Maddin," interview by Mike White, in Guy Maddin: Interviews, ed. D. K. Holm (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 48-49.

(32.) Patricia Clare Ingham, "Contrapuntal Histories," in Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern, eds. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 49-58.

(33.) Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women's Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 180-82. Admittedly, Maddin's films draw more upon a more classical film vocabulary than a pre-1915 one, but references to early cinema, such as the "cinema of attractions," are often employed in discussing his work.

(34.) Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 101-23.

(35.) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Captive Bodies: Postcolonial Subjectivity in Cinema (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 186-87.

(36.) Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 30, 92-93, 103-04.

(37.) Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar, 76-77.

(38.) Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 57-58; and Pevere, "Guy Maddin," 48-49.

(39.) Bennett, "English Canada's Postcolonial Complexities," 118-19.

(40.) Brydon, "The White Inuit Speaks," 191-92.

(41.) Brenda Austin-Smith, "Strange Frontiers: Twenty Years of Manitoba Feature Film," in Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada Since Telefilm, eds. Andre Loiselle and Tom McSorley (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 2006), 238, 240, 247.

(42.) Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 152.